Reproductive Subversion Reconsidered: Contemporary Politics of Reproductive Knowledge

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)

Description

Across labs, clinics, classrooms, and courts, the production and circulation of reproductive knowledge is currently being reshaped by political, legal, and technological transformations. Laws governing abortion and fertility care and funding uncertainties constrain not only access to services but also the making and maintenance of expertise itself — what researchers and practitioners can teach, learn, and do. Meanwhile, shifting technologies alter the boundaries between professional, lay, and automated knowledge, generating new competencies, forms of resistance, and epistemic loss.

This session invites scholarship that examines how contemporary reproductive knowledge is organized, practiced, and contested across social, legal, and technological domains. We encourage papers that explore the transmission, erosion, or reconfiguration of reproductive skills and techniques; examine how law, policy, and politics shape what can be known, taught, or practiced; or assess how reproductive knowledge and practices circulate among medical professionals, activists, educators, and patients. Empirical papers and/or those that interrogate mainstream or popular narratives are especially welcome. We encourage submissions that address racial, class, and ability inequalities, including those focusing on the Global South.

Potential topics include but are not limited to: underground reproduction networks; funding for reproduction research; the governance of abortion knowledge; the de- or re-skilling of reproductive labor; the gain or loss of reproductive skills, techniques, or tools due to for-profit medicine and/or the fear of malpractice; lay knowledge circulation about reproduction; the political economy of reproductive technologies; and reproductive epistemologies fueled by backlash.

Sub Unit

• Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section / Reproductive Subversion Reconsidered: Contemporary Politics of Reproductive Knowledge

Presider

• Joan H. Robinson, CUNY-City College

Individual Presentations

• Beyond 12 weeks: How Abortion Activists in Mexico Produce Subversive Later Abortion Expertise - Daniela Sanchez Lopez, University of Texas-Austin

• Horseshoes and Maternalisms: Homebirth Midwifery and the Politics of Demedicalized Reproductive Expertise - Liora O Goldensher, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

• Medical Fragility and Epistemic Injustice in Reproductive Knowledge and Care - Melanie Jeske, Baylor College of Medicine; Jennifer Elyse James, University of California, San Francisco

• Prenatal Testing at Advanced Maternal Age: Biomedical Routinization and Perceptions of Risk - Emily S. Mann, University of South Carolina-Columbia

• Reflexivity in the production of abortion knowledge through research - Cynthia Beavin, University of Cincinnati; Laetitia Miron, University of Cincinnati; Hillary Gyuras, University of Cincinnati; Danielle Bessett, University of Cincinnati; Jessica Sinclair, Mayo Clinic; Autumn Kirkendall, University of Cincinnati; Michelle L McGowan, Mayo Clinic

• Reproductive Knowledge and the Politics of Parenting in Uncertain Times - Martine Lappé, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo; Jennifer Denbow, California Polytechnic State University

Session Organizers

• Joan H. Robinson, CUNY-City College

• Claire Laurier Decoteau, University of Illinois-Chicago